In an extraordinary back-and-forth between a president and a congressman, President Trump warnedthat Representative Adam Schiff, the lead House impeachment manager, “has not paid the price, yet”.

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG | 6:26PM EST — Sunday, January 26, 2020

Representative Adam B. Schiff, the lead House impeachment manager, said a tweet by President Trump was “intended to be” a threat against him. — Photograph: Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times.

WASHINGTON D.C. — Representative Adam B. Schiff, the House's lead impeachment manager, accused President Trump on Sunday of trying to threaten him on Twitter and urged Republican senators to find the “moral courage to stand up” to a “wrathful and vindictive president.”

Mr. Trump, writing on Twitter on Sunday morning, attacked Mr. Schiff as “a CORRUPT POLITICIAN, and probably a very sick man,” warning, “He has not paid the price, yet, for what he has done to our Country!”

It was an extraordinary back-and-forth between a member of Congress and a sitting president, coming at a turning point in Mr. Trump's impeachment trial on charges of high crimes and misdemeanors — the third presidential impeachment trial in American history. Mr. Schiff's comments, on the NBC program “Meet the Press”, came as Mr. Trump’s legal team planned to resume its defense of the president when the Senate reconvenes on Monday at 1 p.m.

“Look at the president's tweets about me today saying that I should pay a price,” Mr. Schiff said on “Meet the Press”.

“Do you take that as a threat?” asked Chuck Todd, the show's host.

“I think it's intended to be,” the congressman replied.

Mr. Schiff has been under fire from Republicans for mentioning a news report during the trial that alleges that the White House had threatened to put their heads “on a pike” if they voted to convict. He doubled down on that claim on Sunday, saying that he merely meant it would require fearlessness on the part of the senators.

Once Mr. Trump's defense team wraps up its case, senators will have an opportunity to ask questions and then vote on whether to call witnesses or subpoena new documents. Unless at least four Republicans join Democrats to vote to expand the scope of the proceedings, the trial could wrap up as early as this week with Mr. Trump's expected acquittal.

At least two Republican senators — Susan Collins of Maine, who is running for re-election this year, and Mitt Romney of Utah, elected in 2018 — appear to be leaning toward calling witnesses. But Mr. Trump, in an interview that aired on Fox News's “Sunday Morning Futures”, said doing so could be “very bad” for Republican senators who are up for re-election.

“I think it would be very bad for the Republican Party if we lost that great unity that we have right now,” Mr. Trump said in the interview, which was taped at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “Some of them are running, and I think it would be very bad for them.”

Democrats have been pushing for four witnesses — including John R. Bolton, Mr. Trump's former national security adviser, who wrote in an unpublished manuscript that the president conditioned security aid to Ukraine on investigations into Democrats — over the strong objections of Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader. Some Republicans are floating the idea of a witness swap in which they would call either former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. or his son Hunter Biden, both of whom Mr. Trump wanted Ukraine to investigate, even though neither has direct knowledge of Mr. Trump's behavior.

Democrats have opposed such a move, and Mr. Schiff suggested on Sunday that Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who is presiding over the trial, should rule on that question.

“We have a very capable justice sitting right behind me who can make decisions about the materiality of witnesses,” Mr. Schiff said, adding, “We trust the Supreme Court justice.”

If history is any guide, Chief Justice Roberts will be reluctant to do so. When President Bill Clinton was tried in the Senate in 1999, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist used his authority sparingly, leaving most questions to the Senate to decide.

Lawmakers on both sides — along with Alan Dershowitz, a consultant to Mr. Trump's legal team — took to the Sunday morning talk show circuit to make the case for or against Mr. Trump. The president was impeached by the House in December on charges that he abused his oath of office and obstructed Congress by pressuring the leader of Ukraine to investigate his political rivals and then covering it up by concealing evidence from lawmakers.

Mr. Schiff and his team of prosecutors maintain that the president was trying to influence the 2020 election for his personal gain. During an abbreviated session of the Senate on Saturday, the president's team pushed back hard on that assertion, arguing that it was the Democrats who were trying to undo the results of the 2016 election — and to interfere with the one in 2020.

“They're asking you to tear up all of the ballots all across the country on your own initiative, take that decision away from the American people,” Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel, said of the House managers, adding: “They're here to perpetrate the most massive interference in an election in American history, and we can't allow that to happen.”

Mr. Dershowitz, speaking on “Fox News Sunday”, backed away from an assertion he made in 1998, when Mr. Clinton was facing possible impeachment in the House, that a crime is not needed to remove a president from office. Mr. Trump's team has argued that he cannot be convicted or removed because he is not accused of violating a law — an argument Mr. Dershowitz said he now agreed with because he had done more research.

“I've been immersing myself in dusty old books, and I've concluded that no, it has to be a crime,” Mr. Dershowitz said. “That's what scholars do, that's what academics do. We do more research.”

Mr. Schiff has emerged as a polarizing figure in the trial. His speech on Thursday telling lawmakers they could “not trust this president to do what is right for this country” went viral — and earned even grudging respect from some Republicans. But on Friday, he invoked a CBS report that cited an anonymous source saying Republican senators had been warned their heads would be “on a pike” if they voted against Mr. Trump.

In so doing, Mr. Schiff angered several centrist or swing-state Republicans — including Senators Collins and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — who are potential votes in favor of having witnesses. The congressman said on Sunday that he was not intending to offend.

“It is going to be very difficult for some of these senators to stand up to this president. It really is. There's no question about it,” he said. “I don't want to acknowledge it in a way that is offensive to them, but I do want to speak candidly about it — and if this weren't an issue, there wouldn't be an issue about calling witnesses.”

Democrats on Sunday came to Mr. Schiff's defense. During a conference call with reporters, Representative Sylvia Garcia, Democrat of Texas and a House impeachment manager, said Republicans should be disturbed by Mr. Trump's behavior, not Mr. Schiff's.

“If you look at this president and his behavior, he has done some very outlandish things, so it kind of surprised me that Mr. Schiff referencing a news report would be so offensive to them,” she said. “The president's behavior should outrage them to the highest degree.”

• Sheryl Gay Stolberg is a congressional correspondent. In 21 years at The New York Times, she has been a science correspondent, national correspondent, political features reporter and White House correspondent. Previously, at the Los Angeles Times, she shared in two Pulitzer Prizes won by that newspaper's Metro staff. Ms. Stolberg joined The N.Y. Times in 1997 to cover science and health policy, and spent five years writing extensively on bioethics issues, including cloning, the death of a gene therapy patient, stem cell research and an experimental artificial heart. She switched to government in 2002, first covering Congress and then the White House during the presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. She has has profiled dozens of prominent figures in Washington, politics and culture — including Supreme Court justices, a Broadway producer, a C.I.A. agent and presidential candidates. She was a lead author of The Times's 2012 Long Run series of biographical profiles of that year's Republican presidential contenders, including Newt Gingrich, Jon Huntsman, Michele Bachmann and Mitt Romney. In her most recent role as mid-Atlantic bureau chief, she focused on America's cities, notably Baltimore, covering issues of race and policing surrounding the death of Freddie Gray. She returned to Capitol Hill to cover Congress in August 2017. At the Los Angeles Times, Ms. Stolberg shared in two Pulitzer Prizes won by that newspaper's Metro staff, for coverage of the 1992 riots that followed the acquittal of four police officers in the beating of Rodney King, and the devastating 1994 Northridge earthquake. At The New York Times, she shared in a 2009 Gerald Loeb Award for financial journalism, for coverage of President George W. Bush's role in the mortgage meltdown, as part of a 2008 series, The Reckoning. She has longstanding interests in women's issues and gay rights, topics on which she has written frequently. She is the proud mother of two daughters, and loves stories that involve politics, art, culture and history.

• A version of this article appears in The New York Times on Monday, January 27, 2020, on page A14 of the New York print edition with the headline: “Schiff, Calling President ‘Vindictive’, Says He Takes Latest Tweet as a Threat”.

Democrats managing President Trump's impeachment trial have long sought testimony from John R. Bolton, his former national security adviser. — Photograph: Doug Mills/The New York Times.

WASHINGTON D.C. — President Trump told his national security adviser in August that he wanted to continue freezing $391 million in security assistance to Ukraine until officials there helped with investigations into Democrats including the Bidens, according to an unpublished manuscript by the former adviser, John R. Bolton.

The president's statement as described by Mr. Bolton could undercut a key element of his impeachment defense: that the holdup in aid was separate from Mr. Trump's requests that Ukraine announce investigations into his perceived enemies, including former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son Hunter Biden, who had worked for a Ukrainian energy firm while his father was in office.

Mr. Bolton's explosive account of the matter at the center of Mr. Trump's impeachment trial, the third in American history, was included in drafts of a manuscript he has circulated in recent weeks to close associates. He also sent a draft to the White House for a standard review process for some current and former administration officials who write books.

Multiple people described Mr. Bolton's account of the Ukraine affair.

The book presents an outline of what Mr. Bolton might testify to if he is called as a witness in the Senate impeachment trial, the people said. The White House could use the pre-publication review process, which has no set time frame, to delay or even kill the book's publication or omit key passages.

Over dozens of pages, Mr. Bolton described how the Ukraine affair unfolded over several months until he departed the White House in September. He described not only the president's private disparagement of Ukraine but also new details about senior cabinet officials who have publicly tried to sidestep involvement.

For example, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo acknowledged privately that there was no basis to claims by the president's lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani that the ambassador to Ukraine was corrupt and believed Mr. Giuliani may have been acting on behalf of other clients, Mr. Bolton wrote.

Mr. Bolton also said that after the president's July phone call with the president of Ukraine, he raised with Attorney General William P. Barr his concerns about Mr. Giuliani, who was pursuing a shadow Ukraine policy encouraged by the president, and told Mr. Barr that the president had mentioned him on the call. A spokeswoman for Mr. Barr denied that he learned of the call from Mr. Bolton; the Justice Department has said he learned about it only in mid-August.

And the acting White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, was present for at least one phone call where the president and Mr. Giuliani discussed the ambassador, Mr. Bolton wrote. Mr. Mulvaney has told associates he would always step away when the president spoke with his lawyer to protect their attorney-client privilege.

During a previously reported May 23 meeting where top advisers and Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, briefed him about their trip to Kyiv for the inauguration of President Volodymyr Zelensky, Mr. Trump railed about Ukraine trying to damage him and mentioned a conspiracy theory about a hacked Democratic server, according to Mr. Bolton.

The White House did not provide responses to questions about Mr. Bolton's assertions, and representatives for Mr. Johnson, Mr. Pompeo and Mr. Mulvaney did not respond to emails and calls seeking comment on Sunday afternoon.

Mr. Bolton's lawyer blamed the White House for the disclosure of the book's contents. “It is clear, regrettably, from The New York Times article published today that the pre-publication review process has been corrupted and that information has been disclosed by persons other than those properly involved in reviewing the manuscript,” the lawyer, Charles J. Cooper, said on Sunday night.

He said he provided a copy of the book to the White House on December 30 — 12 days after Mr. Trump was impeached — to be reviewed for classified information, though, he said, Mr. Bolton believed it contained none.

Marie L. Yovanovitch, the former United States ambassador to Ukraine, testified that she was “devastated” that the president vilified her. — Photograph: Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times.

The submission to the White House may have given Mr. Trump's aides and lawyers direct insight into what Mr. Bolton would say if he were called to testify at Mr. Trump's impeachment trial. It also intensified concerns among some of his advisers that they needed to block Mr. Bolton from testifying, according to two people familiar with their concerns.

The White House has ordered Mr. Bolton and other key officials with firsthand knowledge of Mr. Trump's dealings not to cooperate with the impeachment inquiry. Mr. Bolton said in a statement this month that he would testify if subpoenaed.

In recent days, some White House officials have described Mr. Bolton as a disgruntled former employee, and have said he took notes that he should have left behind when he departed the administration.

Mr. Trump told reporters last week that he did not want Mr. Bolton to testify and said that even if he simply spoke out publicly, he could damage national security.

“The problem with John is it's a national security problem,” Mr. Trump said at a news conference in Davos, Switzerland. “He knows some of my thoughts. He knows what I think about leaders. What happens if he reveals what I think about a certain leader and it's not very positive?”

“It's going to make the job very hard,” he added.

The Senate impeachment trial could end as early as Friday without witness testimony. Democrats in both the House and Senate have pressed for weeks to include any new witnesses and documents that did not surface during the House impeachment hearings to be fair, focusing on persuading the handful of Republican senators they would need to join them to succeed.

But a week into the trial, most lawmakers say the chances of 51 senators agreeing to call witnesses are dwindling, not growing.

Democrats, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, said the Bolton manuscript underscored the need for him to testify, and the House impeachment managers demanded after this article was published that the Senate vote to call him. “There can be no doubt now that Mr. Bolton directly contradicts the heart of the president's defense,” they said in a statement.

Republicans, though, were mostly silent; a spokesman for the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, declined to comment.

Mr. Bolton would like to testify for several reasons, according to associates. He believes he has relevant information, and he has also expressed concern that if his account of the Ukraine affair emerges only after the trial, he will be accused of holding back to increase his book sales.

Mr. Bolton, 71, a fixture in conservative national security circles since his days in the Reagan administration, joined the White House in 2018 after several people recommended him to the president, including the Republican megadonor Sheldon Adelson.

But Mr. Bolton and Mr. Trump soured on each other over several global crises, including Iranian aggression, Mr. Trump's posture toward Russia and, ultimately, the Ukraine matter. Mr. Bolton was also often at odds with Mr. Pompeo and Mr. Mulvaney throughout his time in the administration.

Key to Mr. Bolton's account about Ukraine is an exchange during a meeting in August with the president after Mr. Trump returned from vacation at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. Mr. Bolton raised the $391 million in congressionally appropriated assistance to Ukraine for its war in the country's east against Russian-backed separatists. Officials had frozen the aid, and a deadline was looming to begin sending it to Kyiv, Mr. Bolton noted.

He, Mr. Pompeo and Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper had collectively pressed the president about releasing the aid nearly a dozen times in the preceding weeks after lower-level officials who worked on Ukraine issues began complaining about the holdup, Mr. Bolton wrote. Mr. Trump had effectively rebuffed them, airing his longstanding grievances about Ukraine, which mixed legitimate efforts by some Ukrainians to back his Democratic 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton, with unsupported accusations and outright conspiracy theories about the country, a key American ally.

Mr. Giuliani had also spent months stoking the president's paranoia about the American ambassador to Ukraine at the time, Marie L. Yovanovitch, claiming that she was openly anti-Trump and needed to be dismissed. Mr. Trump had ordered her removed as early as April 2018 during a private dinner with two Giuliani associates and others, a recording of the conversation made public on Saturday showed.

In his August 2019 discussion with Mr. Bolton, the president appeared focused on the theories Mr. Giuliani had shared with him, replying to Mr. Bolton's question that he preferred sending no assistance to Ukraine until officials had turned over all materials they had about the Russia investigation that related to Mr. Biden and supporters of Mrs. Clinton in Ukraine.

The president often hits at multiple opponents in his harangues, and he frequently lumps together the law enforcement officials who conducted the Russia inquiry with Democrats and other perceived enemies, as he appeared to do in speaking to Mr. Bolton.

Mr. Bolton also described other key moments in the pressure campaign, including Mr. Pompeo's private acknowledgment to him last spring that Mr. Giuliani's claims about Ms. Yovanovitch had no basis and that Mr. Giuliani may have wanted her removed because she might have been targeting his clients who had dealings in Ukraine as she sought to fight corruption.

Ms. Yovanovitch, a Canadian immigrant whose parents fled the Soviet Union and Nazis, was a well-regarded career diplomat who was known as a vigorous fighter against corruption in Ukraine. She was abruptly removed last year and told the president had lost trust in her, even though a boss assured her she had “done nothing wrong.”

Mr. Bolton also said he warned White House lawyers that Mr. Giuliani might have been leveraging his work with the president to help his private clients.

At the impeachment trial, Mr. Trump himself had hoped to have his defense call a range of people to testify who had nothing to do with his efforts related to Ukraine, including Hunter Biden, to frame the case around Democrats. But Mr. McConnell repeatedly told the president that witnesses could backfire, and the White House has followed his lead.

Mr. McConnell and other Republicans in the Senate, working in tandem with Mr. Trump's lawyers, have spent weeks waging their own rhetorical battle to keep their colleagues within the party tent on the question of witnesses, with apparent success. Two of the four Republican senators publicly open to witness votes have sounded notes of skepticism in recent days about the wisdom of having the Senate compel testimony that the House did not get.

Since Mr. Bolton's statement, White House advisers have floated the possibility that they could go to court to try to obtain a restraining order to stop him from speaking. Such an order would be unprecedented, but any attempt to secure it could succeed in tying up his testimony in legal limbo and scaring off Republican moderates wary of letting the trial drag on when its outcome appears clear.

• Maggie Haberman is a White House correspondent. She joined The New York Times in February 2015 as a campaign correspondent. Previously, Ms. Haberman worked as a political reporter at Politico from 2010 to 2015 and at other publications including the New York Post and New York Daily News. She was a finalist for the Mirror Awards, with Glenn Thrush, for “What is Hillary Clinton Afraid of?” which was published in 2014. Her hobbies include singing, and she is married with three children.

• Michael S. Schmidt is a Washington correspondent for The New York Times who covers national security and federal investigations. He was part of two teams that won Pulitzer Prizes in 2018 — one for reporting on workplace sexual harassment issues and the other for coverage of President Donald Trump and his campaign's ties to Russia. For the past year, Michael's coverage has focused on Robert S. Mueller III's investigation into Mr. Trump's campaign and whether the president obstructed justice. From 2012 to 2016, Michael covered the F.B.I., Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon. Michael spent 2011 in Iraq chronicling the last year of the American occupation. From 2007 to 2010, he covered doping and off-the-field issues for the sports section. He started his career at The N.Y. Times in 2005 as a clerk on the foreign desk. Michael has broken several high profile stories. Among them was that former F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, wrote a series of memos on how the president asked for his loyalty and tried to interfere with the F.B.I.'s investigations. Mr. Mueller was appointed after those disclosures. Michael was first to reveal the fact that Hillary Clinton exclusively relied on a personal email account when she was secretary of state. In sports, he broke the stories that Sammy Sosa, David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez had tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs and wrote about the treatment of young baseball players in the Dominican Republic who were exploited by American investors and agents. In 2017, Michael co-authored the stories that outlined how the former Fox News host, Bill O'Reilly, paid off a series of women who made sexual harassment allegations against him. For that coverage, he won the Livingston Award for national reporting, which recognizes the best work of journalists under the age of 35. Michael is a graduate of Lafayette College.

• A version of this article appears in The New York Times on Monday, January 27, 2020, on page A1 of the New York print edition with the headline: “Money to Ukraine Tied to Inquires Bolton Book Says”.